Registration Agreement

WE VERY STONGLY ENCOURAGE YOU NOT TO DISCLOSE YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS FOR PUBLICATION ON ANY WEBSITE

ROOTSCHAT MEMBERS CAN STILL CONTACT YOU SAFELY WITHOUT THE RISK OF VIRUSES OR UNSOLICITED (SPAM) EMAILS

Last updated 11th February 2015

1. Our ForumYour use of RootsChat ('the Forum') and any service contained within constitutes acceptance by you of these Terms & Conditions.

2. EligibilityYou must be a minimum age of 16 to register on and use the Forum. By registering and using the Forum you warrant that you are 16 or older andunderstand your obligations under these Terms & Conditions.

3. Registration3.1 As part of the registration process you will need to create an account, including a username & password. It is your responsibility to ensure that the information you provide is accurate, not misleading. and relates to you. You cannot create an account or username & password using the names and information of another person or using words that are the trademarks or the property of another party (including ours), or vulgar, obscene or in any other way inappropriate. We reserve the right with or without notice to suspend or terminate any account in breach.

3.2 If for any reason you suspect that your username & password has been disclosed to or obtained by another party you should contact us immediately. Please note that we never contact users requesting them to confirm their username & password or other details.

3.3 You are encouraged to choose a username that does not in some way identify your full name, in order to protect your identity from theft.

4. Specific Forum Rules4.1 As a user you agree not to do any of the following:

1. Abuse, harass, threaten, stalk, defame or in anyway seek to violate the rights of another user or third party, or us.

2. Publish or seek to distribute any material or information that is unlawful, harmful, obscene, indecent, libellous, profane, defamatory, racist, or in any other way inappropriate or objectionable.

3. Use or harvest data provided by other users in a way that they would object to.

4. Use data provided by other users for purposes other than contacting them via the Forum.

5. Contact other users in ways they may find inappropriate.

6. Encourage illegal activity or activity that violates the rights of other Forum users or third parties, whether individuals or organisations.

7. Supply or post Content calculated to deliberately mislead other users or third parties, including Content falsely made to appear from or be endorsed by us.

8. To pose as another user, third party, organisation or us for the purposes of obtaining user or third party information.

9. To transmit or transfer any viruses, trojans, worms or any other malicious programs or code intended to spy on, gain control over, disrupt, destroy or in any other way impair any computer hardware or software or any other equipment.

10. Attempt or threaten to gain access to our servers or other equipment in order to disrupt, impair, overload or otherwise hinder or compromise the safety, security or privacy of any of the services provided by or relied upon by us and other users.

11. Reframe or repurpose the Forum or any Content on it or remove or obscure any notices or advertising provided by us on the Forum.

12. Load or provide access to Content on the Forum or link to other content from the Forum, which infringes the trademark, patent, trade secret or any other proprietary right of a third party or infringes any intellectual property law.

13. Make commercial posts or comment spam or attempt to disguise such spam as Content. Commercial posts are only permitted on the 'For Sale Wanted Events' board for a maximum of one commercial post per week, and only for the purpose of a family history (or closely associated) product or service.

14. Use the site or content for any commercial use, or make posts on the Forum that enlists the help of others for commercial use with or without their knowledge of its intended use without approval from us.

15. Send junk or spam email or emails or posts or messages promoting pyramid schemes, chain letters or any other activity that invites users and others to participate in wasting their time and/or money.

16. Use any robot, spider, scraper or other technical means to access the Forum or Content on the Forum.

17. Breach or request the breach of privacy of persons who are or may be living.

4.2 If you breach these Terms & Conditions by sending any unsolicited bulk email, (spam) or any other bulk communications to users your actions will cause harm to us and to the Forum. Such harm is difficult to quantify and as such you agree to pay us the sum of 50 pounds sterling for each and every individual email or other communication sent to a user or third party.

4.3 The above list is not intended to be exhaustive. We reserve the right to remove (with or without notice) Content and suspend or terminate (with or without notice) the account of any user who in our sole judgment is in breach of the rules or the spirit of the rules.

5. Content Ownership5.1 As a user you retain all ownership rights to Content provided by you.

5.2 Where you provide Content as a derivative work of Content provided by others on the Forum, the rights to the Content remain with the original owner, and subject to clause 5.3, below.

5.3 By submitting, posting or displaying your Content on the Forum you agree to grant a non-exclusive non-expiring royalty-free licence to us to use, modify, publicly perform, publicly display, promote, reproduce and distribute such Content on the Forum in any media format. This allows us to place your Content on the Forum and let all users, whether registered or not to view your Content. It also allows us to compress or alter the size of any files you may post onto the Forum to ensure that they can be readily displayed for other users.

5.4 This licence is also royalty-free, which means that the Content is provided free of charge to us and we will not pay for the Content or account for any advertising revenue generated on the Forum or on any specific Content pages.

5.5 This licence also applies worldwide because the Forum can be accessed from anywhere in the world, at any time.

5.6 Also as part of the licence you warrant that any Content provided by you does not belong to a third party whose rights have been violated by the Content being posted on to the Forum. Furthermore if any Content is owned by a third party you agree to pay all royalties owed to that party, without seeking any contribution from us.

6. Copyrighted Material6.1 We do not condone or encourage in any way the posting of copyrighted or proprietary Content or information by any users who are not the legal owners of such Content.

6.2 Where notified of such breaches by the owner of such Content we will remove the Content from the Forum as soon as practicable, but only where we can reasonably ascertain the true owner of such Content.

6.3 If as the owner of such Content you believe that your rights have been infringed you should contact us as soon as possible and provide all relevant information in writing.

6.4 Transcriptions and Lookups can be provided freely on the Forum, provided Crown Copyright is acknowledged, and that you have yourself transcribed the information accurately. Where you have posted information that is Crown Copyright, you must ensure that the information is accurate, in context and add the statement that "This information Crown Copyright, from www.nationalarchives.gov.uk".

6.5 British Census images and data are Crown Copyright. A low resolution portion of a census record may be posted on the Forum, provided that it is only used for private study or research purposes of a non-commercial nature. The Forum limits file attachments to 500kB in order to limit resolution and sizes of images posted for this reason. We would expect such images to be used for handwriting recognition, therefore we disable the ability to attached images in all the "lookup" sections.

6.6 You must ensure that your Content or information does not break any licence agreements, or terms of use set by Third Parties.

7. Content MonitoringUsers can freely add Content to the Forum. We do not monitor or assume any responsibility for Content posted to the Forum. If at any time we decide to monitor the Forum on any occasion it does not mean that we assume responsibility for removing any Content or the conduct of any users.

8. Termination8.1 We may terminate or suspend your user account and/or all or any Content and materials associated with it at any time or where these Terms & Conditions have been breached. Such termination can be with or without notice. As a user you can choose to terminate your account at any time.

8.2 Various clauses within these Terms & Conditions are designed to survive and continue after termination, including (but not limited to) clauses 5 and 12.

8.3 To stop receiving emails, please click the link found at the bottom of each email or update your account profile preferences.

9. AccessWe take all reasonable steps to ensure that the Forum is available and functioning fully at all times. However, we do not accept any responsibility for "down-time" or poor performance of our fileservers or where the Forum is unavailable for any other reason, whether within or outside our direct control.

10. Disclaimer10.1 We are not responsible for the accuracy of any Content on the Forum, nor any advertisements placed on the Forum.

10.2 We are not responsible for any links to third party websites from the Forum and the inclusion of any link does not imply an endorsement of a third party website by us.

11. Limitation of LiabilityWe shall not be liable for any indirect, consequential, exemplary, incidental, special or punitive damages, including loss of profit.

12. IndemnityYou agree to indemnify and hold us and our subsidiaries, affiliates and partners and their respective officers and employees harmless from any loss, fines, fees, liability or claim made by any third party arising from your breach of these Terms & Conditions whilst using the Forum or any other service provided by us.

13. PrivacyUse of the Forum is also governed by our Privacy Policy, which is incorporated into these Terms & Conditions by this reference.

14. SeverabilityThe foregoing paragraphs, sub-paragraphs and clauses of these Terms & Conditions shall be read and construed independently of each other. Should any part of this agreement or its paragraphs, sub-paragraphs or clauses be found invalid it shall not affect the remaining paragraphs, sub-paragraphs and clauses.

15. WaiveriFailure by us to enforce any accrued rights under these Terms & Conditions is not to be taken as or deemed to be a waiver of those rights unless we acknowledge the waiver in writing.

16. JurisdictionThese Terms & Conditions shall be interpreted, construed and enforced in accordance with English law and shall be subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the English Courts.

Family History Help

All Census Lookups are Crown Copyright, National Archives for academic and non-commercial research purposes only.
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